134. How do you grow with hashtags? (f. Joey Engelman)
Feeling out of the loop with hashtags? #️⃣ Don’t worry—this episode will bring you up to speed! Hosts Phil and Lauren meet with content creator (and childhood YouTube star) Joey Engelman to learn everything possible about growing accounts through hashtags. We distill the real purpose behind hashtags, metrics to track, tools to use, and more. Get ready for a fun and informative episode!
Episode transcription
Phil
Well, hello there. Welcome to brand therapy. I'm Phil.
Lauren
And I'm Lauren.
Phil
And this is the podcast where we help you position, build, and promote your brand. Today, we're talking about a topic that comes up often, we get questions about this one, often. And sometimes we answer those questions and then sometimes I call upon people that are smarter than me to answer those questions. We're going to talk about social media. We're going to talk about Instagram. We're going to talk about hashtags. And we're going to do it with quite literally, zero exaggeration, one of my favorite humans on the planet. I've known him for over a decade. Sweet, sweet Joey. Sweet, sweet Joey Engleman. We met working on this strange video project back when I mean, I was in college Joey was probably in high school, let's be honest. Yes, he was.
Lauren
He was not even probably, he was.
Phil
Can I tell you one of the many things I love about Joey, he's just a kind soul. But he has the sharpest, most hilarious sense of humor. And he's a content creator, a very successful one. He has a super cool aesthetic. I've watched him grow and evolve his own brand. Joey's taken one of my courses. Like we just have this little lovely, amazing, everlasting friendship. And you're here today Joey, on Brand Therapy and frankly, as you can tell from the tone of my voice, I'm thrilled about it.
Joey
I am too, you're gonna make me cry happy tears. Thanks for having me.
Phil
So I had this big idea to have you on the podcast because I mean, you are you have been a content creator since what age?
Joey
Like 13. I was there in the very beginning of YouTube.
Phil
Yes, yes. Are you still doing YouTube? Or you're starting your YouTube channel back up, aren't you?
Joey
Yeah, I kind of like dramatically retired for six years. And now I'm trying to bring it back a little bit, just for fun, just to see what happens.
Phil
How are people responding to that, because like, you had very loyal viewers that would have been left hanging for a few years, and then you magically appear again, what is happening?
Joey
They have been like super nice about it, I was kind of petrified of posting and everyone almost kind of like being annoyed about it. Like, what are you doing, and the response that I got that got when I came back was just like enthusiasm for basically whatever I wanted to do. And I think that that having that like liberty to basically make anything I want to make and people saying like all support that is just about like the best warm welcome that you can possibly have.
Lauren
So Phil tells me that you are an expert with hashtags. And I already know that you're so humble that you're not gonna, you're gonna be like, I'm not an expert. But let's just acknowledge that you do know what you're talking about. So I guess, just sort of to kick things off, why do you think it's important to know about and or understand hashtags, if you're a content creator?
Joey
I think that it's super important just because it's there. It's a feature that Instagram has, and it's free. I think that there's so many different ways where you can get your content out there. And this one is almost kind of like free lottery tickets, you have the option of using 30 hashtags per post, I always recommend using all 30 of them. And if one of them hits, then you're going to get 1000s of more impressions and new eyeballs on your content. And I think that that's always going to be the goal is to get your content in front of people that like that type of content. So whenever I talk to people, I'm like, you might as well use them.
Lauren
Yeah, I love the lottery ticket analogy.
Phil
I do too. I've never heard that. Why wouldn't you? It's free?
Lauren
So you recommend that people use all 30 hashtags in every post on Instagram? I know, there's a lot of debate over what kind of usage of hashtags should be utilized, like the low use ones, and the ones that are really popular and there's some people say, you should use a range of up to 100,000 usages of a hashtag. So do you have any recommendations on kind of what that balance looks like?
Joey
Yeah, I think that especially for smaller accounts, niching down as low as you possibly can, is always going to be beneficial to you. I see a lot of people with small accounts. And when I say small, like under 10,000 followers, they're using hashtags with very broad reach or just like the very basic one word hashtags. And I think that you're putting yourself at a disadvantage by doing that, because the competition in those hashtags are so insane, and the smaller you can niche down your hashtags to be as specific as you can possibly get it to your type of content, the more you're going to be able to compete in those smaller hashtags. And then from there, you can slowly work your way up to those bigger, more used hashtags as you go. But yeah, I would say overall, the most important thing is to figure out exactly what type of content you're making, and then find the most specific hashtags tailored to that content as you could possibly get, and hit those really hard.
Phil
Do you use a lot of the same hashtags over and over again? Or do you change it with every post? How do you approach that?
Joey
I have like a rotation of five to six different groups of hashtags that I use, I'll use an example just to make it easier to explain. I had an Instagram account, I was using it as an experimenting account, and it was all tailored towards cheese. I like cheese, I'm like, let me make an Instagram account around cheese. And so I was posting different things about cheese, like cheeseburgers, macaroni and cheese, cheese pulls. And for each of those different posts, I would have a different group of 30 hashtags that were directly relevant to those posts. So for burgers, or cheeseburgers, all of those hashtags were as related to as closely related to cheeseburgers as I possibly could. And so when you're making your content strategy, I think you would agree that you would want to have a group or like several different pillars of content that you're making, I would try to have a different hashtag set for each of those pillars. And once you find those hashtags that are working for you, feel free to reuse them constantly. But I would say you wouldn't want to use the same 30 hashtags for every single post, because you're not making the same type of posts every single time.
Phil
That makes sense.
Lauren
Okay, do you have an opinion on whether hashtags should be in the caption or in the comments of your post?
Joey
I hear that all the time. And my opinion is do whatever is most convenient for you. I've done both just because I wanted to see which one would perform better. And they both performed exactly the same. So I personally, I like to put them in the first comment just because it's less, it takes that clutter out of your caption. But whatever is most convenient for you, I would say do that.
Lauren
Great, great answer. I know some people have really strong opinions on that. So
Phil
Yeah, I'm a first comment kind of guy.
Joey
Yeah, it's one of the biggest common misconceptions with hashtags is that it has to be in the caption. And I just know for a fact that's not the case.
Phil
I've seen before that there are tools that if hashtags are in the caption, it can measure the performance of those hashtags. But you almost have to decide is it worth it? Because if you have them in your caption, and it's very clutery, if you can track them using an app cool, not every app, does that. I can't actually in this particular moment, remember the name of it, but maybe let’s turn this statement into a question. Are there any apps or tools you're using to manage or choose your hashtags?
Joey
The end all be all hashtag research tool that I use is flick.tech, that's the website. And I think it's about $15 a month for the growth tier. And it's so worth it, at least for a few months, because you can import hashtags into there, and it will populate so many important metrics, you might not have even thought you needed to do your research. And on top of that, you can also have it connected to your account. So it will track the performance of your hashtags for each of your posts. These are analytics that I've never been able to have before, even when I was really into hashtags early on, I was doing all of these, I was calculating all of these things myself manually, it was taking hours it was taking days. And now flick the software that they have, it does all of it for you within what it does it pretty much in the background while you're posting for yourself. And on top of that, it's just kind of an all in one place.
And going back to the metrics that I said, you might not even know you needed. The number one metric that I use when I'm doing hashtag research is on Flick, it's daily average post count, and they abbreviate it to the DAPC. That is so clutch to me because it tells you how competitive each of these hashtags are. If you're using a hashtag that gets 1000 or 30,000, new posts, on average, every single day, you are going to get lost at sea with those hashtags. You're going to want to find ones that are super super, that don't have as many daily average posts, and flick gives you all of that information automatically. Whereas I was truly before Flick was around, I was just doing it all. I was all guesswork to me. So I highly recommend that.
Lauren
Is there a number for the DAPC, am I saying it right DAPC that you try to get under?
Joey
I think that it's different for every account but I would always say the lower the better. And it kind of goes in hand with niching down because typically the hashtags that are super niched down to exactly the type of content that you're making, are also not used as frequently as the Big Whale hashtags, you know what I mean? So it's a good indicator of what you can compete in as well as what is going to be likely very, very relevant to your type of content. So I would say depends, I guess.
Phil
Do you want to know something wild and offensive Joey, I use flick.tech and I've never looked at that category before. I'm honestly using and paying for this app, but I don't even know how to use it properly. I have to take the time to understand it. So thank god, you're on the phone. Here's what I do, I click the column that says total, or average total daily likes, I know that I can get between 300 and 1000 likes on a post for me. Now. 1000s, really pushing it like that happens once every three months. But I know that that's my range. So when I look when I enter one hashtag, and I look and see what all the related ones are I sort by column of daily average likes, and I think, okay, let me stay in the range of what I think I could probably get on a post to maybe compete, but I think your system is better.
Joey
I would say if there's one takeaway that I hope you can get from this episode is, for me, sort by daily average post count, and look at the ones that are, I would say, the three factors that I always look for is relevancy, first and foremost. And then daily average post count, and then making sure that it still has enough, even if it has a low amount of daily average posts, it still has a good amount of total posts, because if you're going to niche down super low, there's a danger of picking hashtags that are not even active at all.
So you want to find that perfect median between it has a not a lot of daily average posts, but a good amount of total posts. I would usually say try to find a hashtag that has at least 10,000 total posts already.
Lauren
Hmm. That's so interesting.
joey
That's been my sweet spot, at least. And I also want to clarify, I'm not a hashtag expert. But I've found plenty of success with using hashtags. And this is my go to strategy for it. And so I and I've used it for not just my own accounts, but client accounts, and I've done consultations for other people. And it almost always works. And so that's why I'm even though I wouldn't say I'm an expert, I think that I have enough of a background to confidently give you this information.
Phil
I'm now looking at this DAPC column. I'm looking at it and I've never looked at it before. And I'm happy you introduced this to me. It's a game changer. Is there anything surprising you feel? Well, not yet. It's just new territory to me. I just wasn't even looking at it. I was looking at average likes.
Lauren
Okay, so Joey, I haven't used flick before I logged into Phil's account really quickly once but haven't really spent much time in it certainly didn't look at the DAPC. And I was just wondering if you have any recommendations for sort of using hashtags over time. So measuring success, and also deciding when or if you should drop some hashtags? Is that something that flick does for you? Or is that something you actively manage yourself? What does that look like?
Joey
Yeah, so that was another thing that I was doing manually. I was for a while making dozens of different hashtags sets that were just barely different from one another. I was truly just going through the scientific method, trying to find constants, and then testing out individual hashtags in those sets of 30 to figure out which ones were the weak links, and which ones were the tried and true hashtags that worked every single time. Now, I don't have to do that because like does that for me, where if you connect your account to it, it will keep track of all of the posts that you made. And when you go into the content analytics, it will show you how many of your 30 hashtags successfully ranked and it will tell you which one specifically did and that again, has saved me hours and days of my life. I'm a hashtag fiend like I am a spreadsheet fiend. If I screen shared with you and saw and showed you all the spreadsheets that I had for some of my accounts that I used before flick, you would think I'm a psychopath. But thankfully, I can dial back my psychopathic tendencies with hashtags because of tools like flick now being out there.
Lauren
Amazing.
Phil
I wonder since we're talking about this specific tool, I might even share my screen for the conversation that the three of us are having, obviously the listener can't see what we're doing. So we're gonna have to just talk it out. Three of us media savvy people, I think we can handle it. But here's another embarrassing admission pay for this tool never really paid attention to what's ranking for me, Joey so I just, I guess I should get the hell with the program here.
So I'm looking. I've recently ranked on 14 hashtags. This is good, right? Right.
Joey
Yeah, this is good.
Phil
So flick is telling us Which hashtags, how many times I've used them? How many times I've ranked on them, and then they give a rank ratio with that information? Average best rank. I don't know what that means.
Joey
It means so when you go into the hashtag itself, where on that list we know how it will show you like the top nine ranked? This is where your best rank has been in relation to that.
Lauren
Oh, so you want the the rank number to be ideally lower?
Joey
Right.
LaUREN
Oh, so Phil, you were a top 10.
Phil
I was top 10 for launch accelerator challenge which was yesterday's post teachable creator, I want to be higher though.
Joey
If you scroll, right, it'll even give you a bar metric of competition score, and potential rank. And so you could even sort all of your hashtags based off of that as well. But I'm such a numbers guy, I rely just feel more comfortable relying all of my research off of the actual numbers itself versus the guestamation that they have there.
Phil
This is the DA PC is when I'm clicking on right now for the three of us to see. So 3000 is way too high, I shouldn't have used that hashtag.
Joey
I mean, I would make sure that at the least you have a good assortment of hashtag DAPC's. So if you're gonna want to use that one because it's so relevant to you, and clearly you ranked in it before so it might be worth trying out again. But I would make sure that you have a good amount that are a lot less than that too.
Lauren
Joey so good with giving feedback. He doesn't want Phil to feel bad about that using that hashtag.
Phil
I'm like, Joey, look at this disaster mess.
Joey
You ranked in it. So yeah, I would say keep that in your in your tool shed.
Lauren
#digitalmarketingagency.
Phil
It's cool, because it tracks every single hashtag you use. That's why I like this tool. Yes, you have to pay for it. No, they're not sponsoring this episode. But they are the best tool on the market. Every influencer, every Instagram strategist is talking about like flick.tech. And it's cool that a player comes into the market actually relatively late and the tool has become popular, maybe a year, year and a half. And it's super cool that it's now pretty mainstream, good for them totally.
Joey
And another thing that I love about it, like going back to how it does all of that in the background, the fact that you had it even though you weren't using it for however long you've had it connected, you are now able to go in there and see all of that data that it's been collecting over time for you. So even if you are a little bit passive with it, you can go in there and jump in anytime. And it has all of that for you.
Lauren
Yeah, remember when you used to have to go on Instagram manually? It was horrible.
Joey
I love Instagram. But Instagram is not very front facing as far as what analytics most people really want to see. Whereas with YouTube, it gives you pretty much like so many metrics you could never go through all of them. With Instagram, you go to view insights and it's like, yeah, this is how many followers you've gotten. This is the amount of impressions and that's basically it. I hope Instagram is listening to this, please give us the these kind of analytics so we could use them ourselves.
Lauren
I mean, maybe it'll happen with Facebook, you get them generally. So maybe it'll happen someday. You can't even export the data. It's awful.
Phil
It is. It's annoying. Is there any way besides flick.tech to see the performance of your hashtags? Do you know, Joey? I don't know, necessarily the answer this question.
Joey
I don't know if this is still available, but there's this little hack that you can do on your Instagram account where if you go through and pretend to boost your post, and then at the very end bail, it'll show you the individual hashtags how many impressions you're getting for each one. Part of me thinks that they have that there by accident. But my on the other side, like I think maybe they have it there so that it will encourage you to promote and basically spend money on their platform. But that's basically it's always just been a guessing game with hashtags. And that's why I always recommend post a lot, especially early on not so that you can go viral but so you can get as much information about which hashtags are best to use early on.
Phil
That's really good advice. Yeah. I'm impressed that we've gone for 22 minutes talking about something so specific. Lauren, do you have any other questions about this topic?
Lauren
I guess I'm curious to know if there's, if there are any other words of wisdom that you have for people using hashtags based on what you've experienced with your clients?
Joey
Hmm. I would say that the content is still the most important thing. You can have the perfect set of 30 hashtags and still not get any impressions off of them based on the quality of your content. So content always has to come first. And I would also say just do a lot of market research. See what performs really well with each of these hashtags and make sure that it's a good fit. Some hashtags are within your niche, but they're very quote or like text graphic heavy. And you're posting a video, it's not always going to perform really well with those. So it's time consuming, but spend a couple hours importing hundreds of hashtags into flick and go through as many of them as you can individually and just make sure that they fit with your actual content that that you plan on on posting.
Lauren
Perfect, excellent advice.
Phil
That's great advice.
Joey
There we go content.
Phil
There we go. Content is always going to be more important than the hashtag you use on a post. Thank you for making this interesting. A topic that's actually kind of dry, but I feel like you've added a lot of color and interest to this. You even talked extremely seriously about cheese.
Joey
Both things, hashtags, and cheese. This is the perfect podcast episode for me. Both things I'm very passionate about.
Phil
I'm grateful for you hanging out with us today on Brand Therapy You did really dive into specifics on this topic that I think is relevant to every single content creator. Joey did you know that you're the best?
JOey
I know now, because I trust your opinion.
Phil
Oh, there we go. Well, let's have you back on again. And even if it's not about hashtags it could be about I can't wait to see how this YouTube comeback happens.
Joey
Gonna make a whole documentary about cheese. That's the plan.
Lauren
Is it really?Joey
Well I'm half kidding.
Phil
He's half kidding. And we're not half kidding about us promising you that you get to come back on the podcast when you're ready to promote the documentary.
Joey
Okay, awesome. Yeah, I can't wait.
Phil
What a pleasure. Where can people find you?
Joey
You can just search my name on Instagram or anything like that. It's Joey Engelman. It's spelled angel man but with an E at the front instead of an A. Feel free to shoot me a DM if you have any questions about this kind of stuff. I will talk your ear off about it.
Phil
Cheese and hashtags. You are the smartest person I know when it comes to both of those topics. Thank you, Joey for hanging out with us on Brand Therapy.
Joey
Thank you.
